Game Mod

Just because the game designers made a good game doesn't mean you can't make it even better. Or at least different.

Game modifications, or "mods" for short, are any alterations to a game that were not made by the game's license holder. They can be unofficial Expansion Packs (new maps or new equipment in the same game), completely unrelated games that merely use the source game's software as a backbone ("total conversions"), or just quality-of-life adjustments to the original, such as Fan Translations, bug fixes, character Cameo appearances (which can often lead to Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot scenarios), or House Rules. (Or, if the game includes any attractive women or men, nude patches.)

Some games are deliberately designed to be easy to modify, including a "construction set" of sorts to build levels, weapons, etc., and whole modding communities spring up as a result. However, some types of mods are discouraged, or even cracked down on, for good reason: a mod in the hands of a player but not his opponent usually means an unfair advantage. (Some God Modders will use these anyway and hope they aren't caught.)

A few mods take advantage of content that was programmed into the game in the early stages, then scrapped from the final design. Unless space is a big issue, the programmers usually leave all this content Dummied Out in the game's code. This leaves an opening for a modder to re-introduce an access point and enjoy the missing content... albeit at their own risk, since it's usually unfinished and untested. A safer and more success-guaranteed approach is the graphic overhauling. PC hardwares advance through times, making it capable of handling more detailed graphic and it is required for an old game to look new and fresh to keep it alive among the community, and to avoid making the game being overwhelmed by current-gen games.

It's much easier to mod a computer game than a hard-coded console game, but creative adjustments to a save file (and, with the most recent generation of games, console hard drive content) and/or use of a Game Shark allow determined amateur programmers to mod with the best of them. Most often, however, mods of console games are edits of the ROM files used in Emulation. These tend to be referred to as "ROM hacks" and are usually considered a separate thing from mods, even though when you get right down to it, they're really the same.

Early ROM hacks were largely present in Famiclone consoles and cartridges, especially where the said system wasn't officially released. Cartridges contained graphics hacks very often. The most common ones were those where the main character was replaced by Mario.

Unfortunately, ROM hacks are probably the biggest offender of Sturgeon's Law. A few years ago, most ROM hacks consisted of adding tons of offensive and poorly drawn sprite edits like cursing on the walls, gobs of blood, pornography, and (for some odd reason) pro-KKK material.

Which itself has its own devoted mod community, making game modes (like the ever popular space build), scripted items (lua), new models, scripted weapons (sweps), new tools (stools), new maps, textures, materials, and scripts.

Just about every mod for Gmod requires Wiremod, plus then there are the 4 Stargate addon packs, the Stargate addon pack by pyrospirit, Mckay's Addon Pack, Carter's Addon Pack, and SG-Mod, and then there's the SBEP for Spacebuild.

Team Fortress began life as a free mod for Quake, but Valve hired the staff, recreated the mod for Half-Life (calling it Team Fortress Classic) and then created their own sequel, Team Fortress 2. Similarly, the Reaper Bot was a Quake mod which created AI players to fill out smaller deathmatch games. Valve hired that guy to help with the AI soldiers for Half-Life, and it became one of the huge selling points of the game.

Ditto Day of Defeat (WWII-themed mod that gone into simulation farther than Counter-Strike, and had one of the best bots ever at the time) and Recoil, mods purchased by Valve and integrated into their releases.

Valve's Alien Swarm is also based off an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod and the inspiration for Left 4 Dead was the popular zombie mods for Counter-Strike.

Speaking of Team Fortress 2, there are fans out there who love to make texture hacks to change the appearance of weapons, hats, character models, etc. to further hilarify their game experience. FPS Banana has a ton of skins for your perusal.

Why go to a site when the game now accepts custom content as actual content? This part of the main site (Contribute!) is where anyone can send their custom models, letting Valve put them in the game. As of now, there are 88 community made Nice Hats and 29 weapons, all the visuals sorted out by talented members of the community.

There are also quite a few fun game mods out there: Pyro Dodgeball, Prop Hunt, Vs. Saxton Hale, TF2 Ware, and Zombie Fortress, to name a few.

There's also mods that alters the gameplay of existing modes. Like Randomizer, respawn time disable/reversal, class limitation and it's related Highlander mode, and Hardcore- game servers with crits disabled.

Anyone play Adam Foster's MINERVA mod and noticed the excellent and atypical style of level design he used? Valve did, first helping him out with the last couple of chapters, and then hiring him to work on HL2: Episode 3!

Empires combines RTS and FPS like Iron Grip, but in a different manner; players play on one of two different armies fighting each other, each with their own commander to whom the game functions like a standard RTS.

Both Left 4 Dead games have a level editor that allows people to create their own survival and campaign/VS maps and can include custom sounds and music, scripted crescendo events, and other things. Naturally, there have been maps of other games like Mario, Zelda, and even Half Life 2.

Valve recently announced the Mutations mode for Left 4 Dead 2. In a nutshell, it's basically a game mod from the developers themselves. Each week a new mutation is released while the old one is removed. One example is Realism VS, which combines Realism mode and VS mode into one.

Recently the developers have encouraged players to develop their own Mutations for submission to be featured for a week. They've also been featuring user-created campaigns on the official blog, and hosting them on the official servers.

Portal`s honorable mention is Portal: Prelude, an unofficial prequel that introduces fairly-harder-than-original levels, new puzzle elements and several additional hours of gameplay for hardcore Portal fans, which got one million (!!!) downloads and a following of its own.[1]

One of the earliest game series to still have an active modding community today is the Doom series, which intentionally allowed modding of all kinds (Wolfenstein 3D wasn't designed this way, but fans were able to mod it anyway), with the first editors coming out just months after its release. One particular Mod, The New Technology: Evilution (later known simply as TNT: Evilution,) was intended to be freeware, until it was announced at the Usenet Doom boards, on its intended release date, that not only would its release be postponed, but it would become a commercial product—published by none other than id Software themselves! The reaction to this announcement was... heated, to say the least. The product would later come out as part of Final Doom—within the same month as Quake. And the only place where the team was credited—the DOS text-mode post-exit screen—didn't appear in the bundled Windows 95 version, which is how most people installed the game anyway.

And due to using the Doom engine, the games Heretic, Hexen, and Strife also have a decent number of mods for them, though not as many as Doom. In addition, there are also source ports designed to be compatible with multiple Doom engine games, allowing the creation of mods making use of the various features introduced in those later games.

On a lesser scale, Doom 3 has a large amount of mods available, which range from solving common complaints (adding flashlights to the weapons [Finally, there's Duct Tape on Mars!] and correcting the dismal mechanics of the shotgun, for example) to full stand-alone singleplayer campaigns.

Into Cerberon is a total conversion into a Descent fangame. The name's based onDescent Into Cerberon, a music track from Quake II.

Duke Nukem 3D is another game that has had a fairly large number of game mods and TCs created for it. A list of the more recent mods is as follows.

Duke Plus, created by Dan "Deeperthought" Gaskill, started as a means to enhance the use of level effects in user maps by adding elements such as realistic water that could have both above-water and under-water effects in the same sector, in addition to have the ability to mirror and expand the size of existing maps for changing the experience of existing levels. It also possesses weather effects like rain and snow, a realistic acceleration system for running/moving, the ability to grapple along the sides of walls [i.e. mantling], improved enemy behavior, the ability to pick up, drag, or throw various items like crates or other background objects, etc. Some new weapon types were also later added, including a laser pistol taken from the Assault Captains (with a chargeable fire function), a gravity gun substitute to the Expander, two different types of shotguns instead of the original, among other things.

Naferia's Reign: Invasion of the Dark Mistress, a mod created by Jack "Lord Misfit" Walker, is still in the works, but many betas are released, often once every two or three months. This mod might be considered to be one of the biggest FPS/RPG hybrid mods for a game yet, as it not only incorporates normal RPG elements like leveling up during gameplay, but allows use of a group of 15 different characters, including Duke Nukem himself. The kicker: this isn't like Hexen, where a character is chosen for the whole of the game, but where characters are found over the course of the game and can be swapped back and forth via an extra menu system. Each character has their own skills, strengths and weaknesses and their own main functions in the team. And that's just a few of the numerous features of the mod. Listing them all would take up too much space.

Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942. It has the same objectives as the original but transplants the setting from World War II to Operation Desert Storm, updating the maps and weapons accordingly.

Interestingly, much like Valve has a habit of hiring good modders, EA bought Trauma Studios (makers of Desert Combat) to work on its modern-day sequel, Battlefield 2.

The original Battlefield 1942 had several total conversion mods (Desert Combat being the most popular). There was Forgotten Hope, a realism mod adding a large amount of new content and balance changes to give a more gritty, realistic WWII; Eve of Destruction, a total conversion mod set in Vietnam; and Silent Heroes, a total conversion mod based on a speculative conflict between Sweden and Norway, just to name a few.

A mod team was also working on a mod in this engine, but limitations forced them to move it to Source (see "Empires" above).

It's hard to mention Battlefield: 1942 mods and not think of the Turbo Mod. The speed of all weapons and vehicles was absurdly increased and alternate fire on all vehicles activated a rocket boost. Multiplayer games with this tended to devolve into goofy stunts like a never-ending loop-the-loop with jeeps or jumping over Midway island using a battleship.

There is also Project Reality, a mod for Battlefield 2 that aims to make the game more realistic. It is so popular that some people buy the game just for it.

The "accessible realism", WWII-themed Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 would be a good example. It was created for Unreal Tournament 2004 (an odd choice for a realism mod), and after much effort, went on to win $1,000,000 and free Unreal Engine 2 licenses in a Mod Competition (nVidia's "Make Something Unreal" contest). The team, Tripwire Interactive, has since released a retail, stand-alone edition of their mod, entitled Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45.

Tripwire has since also published Killing Floor, another Unreal Tournament 2004 mod gone retail, as well as having created Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad on Unreal Engine 3.

Unreal Tournament in general has lots of mods. One of the most well-known ones is ChaosUT, an offshoot to the original mod released for Quake II. It adds a complete arsenal of guns, some of them with multiple kinds of ammunition (normal, armor-piercing, poisonous and/or explosive); Ur Example is the Lethal Joke Item known as the Proxy, a sentient claymore which chases you down with a smiley face and a cute voice. Or the new superweapon, the Gravity Vortex, which creates a micro-black hole that sucks in and gibs everyone in a substantial radius for several seconds; it even ignores the godmode cheat. Aside from the guns, other accessories were added too like Gravity Belts as toggleable jumpboots and grappling hooks to move over impassable terrain. And who could forget the ability to amass your remaining rocket ammo and go kamikaze... Oh, and the bots are freakishly good with all weapons, especially the crossbow.

Then came ChaosUT2 for the sequel, bringing with it a graphical upgrade and a few new additions like the Chaos Pulse Pistol as dual-wieldable spawning weapons, the C.U.T.T.E.R. which is a badass-looking version of the Ripper, the Chaos Grenade Launcher with four types of munitions (explosive, poison, napalm, flashbang/EMP) and the Vortex Launcher which now enables the user to actually run away from the black hole before it activates. The MUG (Multi Utility Gun) now operates like a normal flamethrower and the Claw can be loaded with needle packs whose projectiles stick onto whoever touches them and continually deals damage. It even added two vehicles: the easily forgettable hoverboard and the Chaos Bike.

Then came the sad day when the dev team announced that due to the lack of interest in UT3, ChaosUT3 was cancelled.

Oldskool is another notable modification pack. It allows true single player campaign gaming, supporting the original Unreal as well as several custom map packs (Operation: Na Pali and Nali Chronicles being two of the most famous). It also works as a customizable mutator for practice sessions and multiplayer.

Speaking of UT2004, there's the Ballistic Weapons mod that converts the game into a realistic tactical shooter complete with a huge arsenal of guns and features like dynamic accuracy and recoil; toggleable scopes and silencers on many of the weapons; toggleable firing modes between single-shot, burst-of-three[2] and full auto (the minigun instead has single-shot, 1800RPM, 2400RPM and 3600RPM); the loadout system which lets players customize their spawn inventory... All but two guns are kinetic[3] and are provided with a backstory. Recoil is very realistic: it's impossible to fire the minigun at full speed and hit someone unless the built-in bipod is deployed first (machine guns have bipods too). All pistols and submachine guns can be dual-wielded, even different ones.

The sheer number of mods released for Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2 (both of which are now freeware by Sierra releasing and abandoning it) is fairly astounding, not to mention what's been done with the vehicle systems.

Fans have produced countless third-party maps and mods for all three Marathon games, including a number of "total conversions" (eg: Devil in a Blue Dress, EVIL, Erodrome, Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, Portal of Sigma, RED, Rubicon, Tempus Irae, Trojan.) The third game, Infinity, was thus named because its headline feature was a set of polished 1st-party modding tools.

Both Thief: The Dark Project and its sequel, Thief 2: The Metal Age have loads upon loads of new items, UI improvements, AI, missions, and even entire campaigns! Though the first game is over ten years old, the mod community is still plenty healthy.

Halo: Combat Evolved has an extensive map modding community, which often range from crappy to excellent. All of which is played on a separate version of the game called "Halo: Custom Edition" (which requires the retail version to work).

Deus Ex still has a very strong modding community despite being an older game. This includes graphical and gameplay tweaks such as Shifter, and many total conversions. The most impressive of these is The Nameless Mod which took seven years to complete and is a complete game including Deus Ex gameplay, branching storylines, and thousands of lines of voiced dialogue.

Zodiac is another one, a fan made Interquel that allows you to play as Paul Denton.

2027 is a fan made prequel featuring a nonlinear plot, real-world weapons, and DX9 graphics.

STALKER also has a number of mods, including the Complete 2009 mod, which provides a massive graphical upgrade and a wide range of gameplay tweaks.

AMK: Narodnaya Soljanka for Shadow of Chernobyl may not be as much of an eye candy, but more than makes up for it by bringing in lots of levels from Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, as well as a mind-boggling variety of new gear, new artifacts, consumables and a ton of new quests. Needless to say, the game world gets huge enough to make a complete playthrough qualify as a virtual vacation of sorts.

The modding community for the games of the Dark Forces Saga was also very thriving in the past, especially for Dark Forces (link directs to the major DF fansite DF-21.net) and Jedi Knight (link directs to the major JK fansite The Massassi Temple). And even so, new levels are still being worked on even today, with recent major releases including Magrucko Daines and TODOA. Some mod developers, such as Patrick Haslow (creator of The Dark Tide) have even worked on major titles such as Wolfenstein.

The infamous Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In the game, CJ can have sex with various women, but the depiction is limited to seeing them entering the woman's house. Hot Coffee re-enables a Dummied Out sequence where the player not only gets to watch but controls the action to a degree. It was later patched. The discovery led to a brief revival of the Games Are Evil panic.

Incidentally, PC players tend to avoid said patch not because they want to enable it but rather because it interferes with actual mods.

Speaking of which, the PC release of San Andreas has considerable popularity in Japan because of or leading to the mass number of Touhou mods made for it. I know you're thinking that Marisa in a world full of gangsters does not compute but still...

The Grand Theft Auto series of games has always appeared to be ripe for multiplayer, but it was never implemented by the designers. Enter Multi Theft Auto, a mod that allowed for the player of the PC version to play multiplayer with large numbers of players and its own custom game modes. Multi Theft Auto was released for GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas, and is massively popular with the PC players for all of them. Rockstar got the hint with the PSP version of Liberty City Stories, which had online multiplayer for up to six players. They completely polished it for GTA IV, with 16-player (32 for the PC) support and 15 game modes. GTA IV's multiplayer has some similarities to MTA, including customizable character models, the whole city to explore and fight in, and some game modes.

The Escape Velocity series featured the ability to mod the games simply by dropping the mod (or plug) into the Plug-ins folder. The most complex mods, however, require overwrite of key data files; ironically, the total conversion mods for the third game that allow you to play the first two games (mods that were released by the publisher) fall into this category.

Of course, the ease of modding for the EV games comes from the fact that the games were designed for the Macintosh, where you can modify the operating system by dropping files on the System Folder (and, starting in System 7, the OS would attempt to sort the extensions/control panels into the correct folders.

Being an ASCII-based nongraphical game, Dwarf Fortress is quite friendly to modders. Some of the more common changes to the game include new wildlife, plantlife, and races, the ability to play as non-dwarven races, and changes to existing animal stats. Like war bears.

It's also been modded into Ancient Roman Fortress and Fallout Fortress. There are both "beginners' versions" that are less sadistically difficult that turn your dorfs into little Terminators and versions that make every monster six times stronger. There's also some really dreadful cheating possibilities in playing with the raw files; it's possible to make your forges spit out Unobtanium, for instance, allowing your tiny outpost to fleece an Elven caravan out of everything they own in exchange for one earring.

Minecraft, having been open to modders since the beginning, has a very large modding community with lots of mods to add on. Some add simple things like improved crafting recipes, others add entire new worlds.

A community under the name of Bukkit has numerous plugins used on multiplayer servers with a variety of features. Some are for anti griefing measures, such as disabling damage to terrain by explosions and disabling fire from spreading, to having an in game economy for role playing purposes. The Bukkit community has gained so much attention and popularity that the developers of Minecraft have plans to incorporate the game with the Bukkit plugins to make modding easier. The plugins can be found here.

Baldur's Gate II, even well after a decade past its initial release, still boasts a very active modding community. Most common additions allow the player to complete new quests, recruit new NPCs, and add new dialogue and romance options. More technically, there are mods for new items, shops, character class kits, and adjusted combat and alignment mechanics. Some of the most popular and long-last mods include:

Ascension: Originally designed by the game's creators to be included in the game, Ascension completely revamps the climactic final battle in the Throne of Bhaal expansion. Among other things, it allows the party to refight the Children of Bhaal again rather than random hordes of demons, makes the Big Bad tempt Sarevok with renewed power (which he may or may not accept), and can forcibly transform Imoen into the Slayer Bhaalspawn form. Additional mods, such as Turnabout, give the player the option of summoning additional NPCs to aid him, including possibly Jon Irenicus. Finally, the Big Bad may summon Demogorgon as a last ditch effort.

Unfinished Business: Another mod completed by the fanbase after its inclusion in the original game couldn't be completed in time. U.B. takes many of the lingering script remnants in the game's code and extrapolates them into playable sidequests.

Kelsey NPC: Far and away one of the best and most popular NPC additions, Kelsey is a sorcerer from a family background of successful merchants. He is fully voiced, with banter options with all the standard NPCs, a romance option for female PCs, a fair number of sidequests, and is fully playable through the end of Throne of Bhaal.

Baldur's Gate Trilogy: One of the few so-called megamods, BGT is designed to take all of BG1's content and convert it into the BG2 engine. This, along with some added dialogue options, allow both games, along with their expansions, to be played as a single massive game. This has also opened up many modders to add content to BG1, whereas it was originally neglected as being difficult to modify. But with BGT installed, both games run on the same engine and thus modifications based on the sequel's engine can be introduced into the original game. In the same way, NPCs can be introduced in the first game and be made to run seamlessly through the entire series.

Big World Project: An insanely ambitious mod still in production, the BWP is less a mod and more of a toolset with a number of utilities designed to do no less than let the player download and install any combination of hundreds of available mods, resolve all conflicts between them, patch some mods with others, and debug the entire shebang. The BWP downloads the mods for you, installs them for you, debugs and deconflicts them for you, and despite still being in development, can install several gigs worth of WeiDU-based mods with minimum difficulty. Though if you're installing any appreciable number, the entire process can take several hours to complete. It is, quite simply, the ultimate in ease-of-use, hands free mod installation for the Baldur's Gate series.

One of the most famous cases is Bethesda and their SDK - The TESCS (The Elder Scrolls Construction Set) for Morrowind and Oblivion and the aptly-named GECK for Fallout 3. In each case - and in something of a case of Awesome Yet Practical the SDK released are the self-same tools used by Bethesda to develop the game. This is a big, big part of the reason why Bethesda games are known as modder-friendly.

Morrowind is also a very good example of the "graphic update" behavior of game mods mentioned at the top of the page, to the point that a properly-modded Morrowind can easily stand up to its successor (a game which came out more than four years later).

Even without the plugins, however, Morrowind modding has evolved considerably over time. A typical Morrowind modding setup includes: an external utility used to patch the game coding itself (Morrowind Code Patch), another external utility to patch the code specifically to avoid crashes (.exe Optimizer), another external utility to enchance the scripting capabilities of plugins (Morrowind Script Enhancer), another external utility to allow further more robust graphics (Morrowind Graphics Extender), and more often than not, some form of mod load order sorter (Wyre Mash is the most common). And this isn't even counting extra tools used by people who are actually creating mods (like TES Tool or TESPCD), or other things like external joystick configuration programs.

In the same vein as its predecessor, Oblivion, the fourth installment of the Elder Scrolls series, also has a really massive quantity (and quality) of mods available, to the point where a lot of people actually refuse to play an unmodded game.

The most popular mod for Oblivion is by far Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. In addition to making the game a lot harder, it improves just about every aspect of the game, reworking many Scrappy Mechanics. This mod was even endorsed by critics, and will likely influence the development of any further Elder Scrolls games (particularly now that the man himself is working on Fallout: New Vegas for Obsidian).

There is also an overwhelming amount of texture replacers for Oblivion, as the ones in the vanilla game are very noticeably low res by today's standards. One can find hundreds of texture packs for characters, creatures, clothing, armor, weapons, architecture, landscape, foliage, etc (though obviously many of these will cause the game's performance to plummet).

Many mods are also dedicated to fixing some of the inaccuracies and retcons compared to the old games, such as Advanced Enclave Power armor from Fallout 2, and many weapons from the earlier games.

A particularly impressive mod that's been made for Fallout 3 and New Vegas is RTS. Where you can take virtually any NPC or object, and move them to a town that you build yourself. Essentially making it into an incredibly violent post-apocalyptic The Sims game.

Killap's "Fallout 2 Restoration Project" adds tons of material, mostly stuff that was cut because it couldn't be completed on time (such as rescuing Sulik's sister, the EPA, a secret Hubologist compound with loot, and several ending messages including a positive end for the deathclaws), but also multiple bug fixes and various minor improvements.

The only problem with the Megamod and the Restoration Project is that Fallout 1 and 2 were not designed with mods in mind, so the mods are somewhat unstable...but at any rate still better than unpatched Fallout 2.

Freedom Force has much more fan-created content than official add-ons, most famous is The Strangers witch is about the size of the original game and features much more technically advanced missions and powers. One mission features a four way battle between The Strangers, a pod of atlantains, a berserk shape-shifting robot, antarctican demon hunters and the Legions of Hell.

Romancing SaGa 3 So many hacks were made to that game to include characters from various anime, video games and Manga even other SaGa Characters, even adding bosses from the previous Romancing SaGa Games and Apollo from SaGa 2 they have even changed the music and added new spells, and scenarios in addition.

They have even included a new boss from the Romancing SaGa Ultimania The Mother of Death, Saruin, Schirach, and Elore; Saiva the Goddess of Destruction

While most mods to the game are discouraged as cheating and violate the Terms of Service, Final Fantasy XI PC versions are a frequent subject of mods. The least invasive and generally considered most benign (and easiest) involves modifying the game's data files to change the music for various areas or the visual appearance of monsters, NPCs, or player characters. There is a fairly significant mod community dedicated to this. On the somewhat more invasive level, a third-party application exists to provide one of the most heavily-player-demanded features, the ability to run the game windowed instead of full-screen, and supports a plugin interface to load additional mods into the game. This program is both highly popular and highly controversial, with many players in stark disagreement as to whether the bundled plugins count as cheats (though there are other plugins and third-party apps that are more generally accepted as obvious cheats) or simply features that should have been included in the first place. Square Enix has a policy of banning players who openly admit to using it, and occasionally breaks it with updates, but has not made a concerted effort to address it, and has recently caved on the player demand for Windowed mode, and released it.... without all the mods they say violates the ToS, leading to the usual reaction.

The PC version of Final Fantasy VII has a very active modding scene; the port is notoriously bad, being hindered by a staggered development cycle and numerous incompatibility problems. As such, the modding community has come up with a variety of patches and tools solely for fixing the game; there's even a custom-made graphics driver. There's also a huge volume of superficial mods, offering replacement character models (for both field and battle areas), high-definition textures, total menu overhauls, a complete retranslation effort and a tool to replace the in-game MIDI files with custom music.

Both the original Neverwinter Nights and its sequel came with all the tools needed to build new adventures. This is because they were conceived as "D&D on your PC": A DM would make a campaign, use the modding tools to build a session, referee it as a hosted netgame on his computer, and the rest of his group of players would all log in and run it from their computers, sort of like a virtual tabletop.

The original Neverwinter Nights is probably the king of this trope. It's been out for years, and the toolset is considered, at least was considered, to be one of the best, most complete ever created. Essentially, you can make content (and some people have, but the original campaign sets the bar pretty low.) that is equal to (or greater than) the original and expansion content, in terms of complexity, depth, and detail.

On the other hands, the Knights of the Old Republic games don't have any official tools, despite using basically the same engine as NWN; this, however, didn't stop fans from developing third-party modding tools and making a cornucopia (read: hundreds of truckloads/a lot/a shitload/Gigabytes) of mods of varying quality, some even altering/"enhancing" the game, as well as the addition/alteration of some rather epic side/main quests. That's not even counting the additional items, restored content, models, skins, and bug fixes, etc. for a game that didn't even have an official toolset...

A couple of famous mods are a dialogue pack that restores much of Juhani's dialogue and adds about 20 pages worth of purely fan-made dialogue. The top of the line, however, is Silveredge9's Brotherhood of Shadow which includes three new recruitable characters, fully-voiced dialogue, at least a dozen all-new locations, flashbacks to your hunt for the Star Forge as Darth Revan, the fateful battle where you got captured, and single-combat against Mandalore at Malachor V! The only drawback is that, due to its magnitude, it will not play nicely with other mods.

A different mod to restore cut content has been released, and it's currently in open beta. It can be found here [dead link].

Visual Mods are very popular among World of Warcraft players. So popular that Blizzard has worked some of the mods into the main game, such as Raid Assist (which helps with said Raids by designating targets and tanks) or an option to speed up quest descriptions. Other mods provide additional information on items or change the UI (User Interface) to the players likings.

World of Warcraft is entirely supportive of addons that function entirely within provided scripting commands. On the other hand, data mods—even seemingly-innocuous client-only mods like model changes or (sigh) nude patches are forbidden.

And many of those popular mods that were made into the main game (Enemy stats, Talent previews, quest tracking, raid warnings) have been in the game for so long most players probably won't remember what playing the game was like when those were only available with mods. (When, after patch, every single mod had to be updated...and these weren't just content patches that'd render the mods useless...There are numerous bug-fixing patches)

Not that it's stopping perverted players of course. Within a week of a data trick to allow a nude mod to work being locked out with a patch, another one will surface and the naked Goldshire mailbox dancing begins anew.

The classic BBS door game Legend Of The Red Dragon was infamous for its ability to use plug-in style mods, which were referred to as IGMs (In Game Modules). A great many of these simply heaped treasure and items on players for free.

The first three generations of Pokémon can be modded with some ease thanks to the proliferation of ROMs and hacking tools.

Like Moemon: A mod which simply replaced all the Pokémon sprites with Moegjinka.

And then there's Touhoumon, a hack of FireRed that replaces each Pokémon with Touhou characters, complete with all-new types, stats, and attacks for flavor.

Similarly, someone on /m/ has started a FireRed hack that replaces Pokémon with various Humongous Mecha, changing the names of types (for instance "FIRE" become "Hot-Blooded") and moves.

Nowadays, most Pokémon hacks are a lot more than graphical or text edits, containg completely new maps, scripts and, in some rare cases, new mechanics and completely rewriting the game. Pokémon Brown and the other hacks of Coolboyman are famous for doing the latter. Rarely is a Pokémon hack completed, however, with most "hackers" getting bored very quickly.

Pokémon also provides an in-universe example - Porygon-Z is the result of applying the Dubious Disc, an unauthorised third-party mod, onto Porygon2. Given that Porygon-Z is said to be glitchy and unstable, perhaps it's a Take That aimed at game mods in general?

Well the evolution is more minor then most. It essentially trades more defense for more attack, so its more like your trading what the creators made for something you find more useful/enjoyable. Likewise, the pokedex entry states that they're prone to random behavior but are still valid pokemon to train, which could mean that mods are prone to crashing or screwing up but still something you can use effectively. Less of a Take That and more of a nod to pokemon's very big modding community.

A group from /x/ has set out to mod Pokémon Fire Red into nightmare fuel for everyone's enjoyment.

Freelancer has some rather good mod communities, notably Crossfire, which actually makes the economy dynamic like it was supposed to be when the game was announced, Discovery Freelancer, which adds more content and optimizes certain elements for multiplayer roleplay, and Freeworlds, a total conversion of Freelancer into the Star Wars universe.

Swords of Xeen is an interesting case. A mod of Darkside of Xeen, it received official support from New World Computing and was included in some compilations of the saga, even if it's not considered canon.

An alpha version was leaked, and is available about the internet, but the version that was 98% done is not in public hands. However, a 99% complete version is.

There is also a video playthrough of the 98% complete beta available to view on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/CEMemorial), enabling you to see the interesting story that the creators constructed.

ROM hacks of Final Fantasy Tactics are also fairly popular. Most of these balance out overpowered equipment (such as making Excalibur's Haste effect temporary instead of permanent), give previously useless equipment like most daggers a reason to be used via stat boosts or special effects, balances out overpowered classes (I'm looking at you, Orlandu), and gives story battles more varied units to fight against. And then there are some hacks that seem solely dedicated to attempting to reach Platform Hell levels of difficulty, with varying success. You can find many of them here.

Torchlight has support for mods out of the box, as well as an editor, and achievements for playing the game with one, five, or ten mods installed.

Mount & Blade and its expansion Warband have a very large, very active modding community. Hundreds of minor mods and dozens of total conversions have been made, and more are released all the time. There's even a Star Wars mod in the works.

Titan Quest has its own modding community, although one mod gets recommended even to first-time players in lieu of the baseline. Consistently. That would be Underlord, which started out by, like Baldur's Gate's Unfinished Business mod, reinstating content that couldn't be implemented in time for Immortal Throne's release, and wound up tweaking and expanding all the masteries (and completely remaking at least half the Thief mastery, now Occult) so all the mastery dyads possible were actually viable. There's even been a mod, Lilith, that's essentially a completely new game that just happens to use TQ's engines.

Be warned, however, that Underlord also severely amps up the difficulty, to the point that the starting zone monsters can kill you. Easily.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance and X-men Legends 2 have a community found here dedicated to making all sorts of mods from fixing balances, adding new abilities and even custom characters that were not in the games initially for various reasons.

The second most played mod after Counter-Strike, and also the second most played non-new release or MMO game online (after Counter-Strike) is Defense of the Ancients, or DotA. It has become far more popular than normal-style Warcraft 3 multiplayer matches.

The Europa Barbarorum mod for Rome: Total War. Began with the intent to revise the game scenario to be as historically correct as possible. The current 1.2 version is a hugely ambitious mod incorporating retextured units, an extremely detailed trait system intended to simulate various aspects of cultural and political life of the time, building descriptions giving considerable amount of historical background information and, perhaps most notably, having original unit voices and commands replaced with new ones in Latin, Attic Greek, Gallic, Q-Celtic, Punic, Pahlav and Proto-Germanic. They have even offered their expertise to Paradox Interactive for the title Europa Universalis: Rome.

There is also another mod, Rome: Total Realism, which aims to do much the same. Explaining the differences between the two would take up this whole page, and in the end which one you use is a matter of personal preference. Both are excellent, however.

There is also a very popular mod based on Lord of the Rings called the Fourth Age Total War. This mod takes Tolkiens abandoned manuscript called 'The New Shadow' and runs with the concept by not only interpreting Middle-earth as it may be in a Total War scenario, with Gondor dealing with it's people turing evil. But it is also filledit with tons of references to Tolkien's work and keeping it true to the spirit of the stories. Even six years since Rome Total War was released, this mod is still being worked un and updated due to the developers insistance on detail, making sure it is released as bug free and finished as possible and also due to the flexibility in design that Rome was. Currently the team are on version 2.6, which has the factions of Rohan, Dunland, the Gondorian regions of the Reunited Kingdom and other factions which have all be fleshed out and fit into the world. Due for release this year is version 3.0, which will add Elves, Dwarves and Dale as playable factions, as well as opening up the western and norther regions of Middle-earth, including the lands of Arnor, the northern part of the Reunited Kingdom.

For every Total War game released, savvy players know it's only a matter of time before a bunch of modders get together to put together and release a mod that aims to correct any historical inaccuracies and gameplay issues.

When Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War first came out, fans knew that they weren't going to get all of the 10+ different armies (not counting sub-armies) that are available for the tabletop wargame. So naturally, mods to put the other armies into the game were begun before the game was even finished, as soon as the beta was released. Of course, due to the Expansion Packs that came out late, nine of those armies presently are are or soon will be in the game, including many ones that had mods in progress. This doesn't stop the modders, who are shifting to gameplay tweaks, adding units not in the game, and making present units closer to their tabletop abilities.

The only army that isn't in Dawn of War is the Tyranids. Although, they are in the sequel (and I hope that the mods to add Dark Eldar/Sisters of Battle aren't as awful as Soulstorm).

Various Command & Conquer games have Total Conversion mods that usually use a later engine for an older game: Tiberian Dawn on the Tiberian Sun engine, all previous games on the Generals engine, Tiberian Sun (Reborn) and Red Alert (A Path Beyond) on the Renegade FPS engine, and I didn't mention Tiberium Wars yet.

There was a Generals-to-Red-Alert-2 TC but when news of Red Alert 3 came out, development ceased. Another promising project was Halogen, a Generals TC to Halo - however, Executive Meddling on the part of Microsoft (more specifically a cease-and-desist letter, no doubt due to Halo Wars being in development) destroyed all trace of it.

In fact, since Red Alert 2 uses a newer build of the Tiberian Sun engine, it is perfectly possible to copy-past the latter's content into the former with some INI editing.

The Tiberian Sun/Red Alert 2 engine is practically a modder's wet dream, with all unit, etc. parameters being written into INI files in plain English and requiring nothing more than Notepad. While many things are hardcoded into the executables and are thus untouchable, modders found a way around that too with RockPatch (buggy EXE hack), NPatch (even more buggy EXE hack) and more recently Ares (DLL injection, still in alpha version).

Likewise other games from the developer (Paradox Interactive) have a lot of mods as well: Europa Universalis 2 has the massive A.G.C.E.E.P., and Europa Universalis 3 has the slightly less Massive Magna Mundi (and a host of others). Paradox make life easy for the mod community by storing most of the game data in text files, so they can be edited with nothing more complicated than Notepad, and have dedicated sections on their official forum.

It's not surprising that Total Annihilation had a large number of mods, including total conversions, given the game was popular; it is rather more surprising that its much less successful sequel, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, had just as many. The versatility of the engine often resulted in additional races or total conversions that many believe are better than the original game.

Let's not forget Spring, a TA-inspired engine positively saturated with great games (most of them free) that are all referred to as "mods".

A strangely popular pursuit is taking one RTS game and making a total conversion mod to essentially turn it into another RTS game 'as seen through the first game's engine'. For example, there are mods that turn Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 into Red Alert 1, Total Annihilation into Red Alert 1, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms into Cossacks: European Wars, and so on and so forth.

Also, attempts are being made to make StarCraft run on Linux by using the Strategus engine. Strategus doesn't support free-roaming units, idle animation, critters, or many of the mechanisms used in Easter Eggs at all, and the creep, Pylon power, and building liftoffs would require at least some minor modifications to the engine itself... good luck with that.

Jagged Alliance 2 has v1.13, whose name is derived from v1.12 being the last official patch. The mod, continually updated to this day, which completely revamps the game and even adds an online multiplayer mode!

Some of the gameplay changes such as the New Inventory system (revising characters' gear so that they would have to wear Load-Bearing Equipment "containers" such as vests, backpacks, and rucksacks), the revised equipment system and the 100-point Action Point system were great.

The Unfinished Business expansion was built specifically to support new campaigns. It even included tools for editings things that were previously hard-coded.

Two major mods were created by hacking the original game's source code. They are Urban Chaos and Wildfire, both developed simultaneously by two different teams for several years after the release of the original game. Eventually, the company that owned the rights to JA2 at the time offered both teams the chance to release their mods as commercial expansions (similar to the Half Life/Counter-Strike deal). The Russian team that made Wildfire eventually took the offer, their mod was released commercially, and the package included the source code for the game executable (published under a semi-open license, paving the way to 1.13).

By 2010, Jagged Alliance 2, Unfinished Business and 1.13 have several dozen campaigns available between them, not to mention many MANY item packages, map packages, and other enhancements. JA2 is easily one of the most heavily modded games released before the year 2000, overtaking even such games as Fallout in sheer volume.

For a game released in 2003, Homeworld 2 has a lot of mods. These come in two flavors, discounting total conversions:

The first are mods that aim to enhance how the two races play out. The most popular are arguably the Complex Mod, and the Point Defense System (PDS) mod. Both added tons of extra features and customizations, essentially making the game more complex (especially in, well, Complex, where rank, soldier population, and morale system is introduced). PDS started out as...a small mod for point defense systems, which became the popular mod they are now. The Tactical Fleet Simulator mod aims somewhat differently unlike the former two. While Complex and PDS emphasizes grand strategy with a lot of decked out units and careful planning, TFS gives decked out units purposely built for intense, fast-paced combats which ups the "tactics" aspect more than "strategy" aspect, which the game is already good for anyway.

The second flavor are mods that try to insert additional races, while mostly retaining original units. These can either mean original units, or factions from the original Homeworld. So far, the most successful one is the Chinese-made FX mod, which adds almost all of HW 1's factions, some of them having completely new starships. Their crowning awesome is that they added the Progenitor race from HW 2, which, in-game, only consists of 4-5 separate units at best. They expanded the race using both unused concept sprites, mishmashed existing units (which they did VERY well), or design from scratch.

Note that there are literally hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of mods for Civilization IV. Firaxis, the developer company, actively encourages modding. In fact, several mods were developed by dev team members themselves and came bundled with the original game, including Next War (a heckuvalot like 1984) and Final Frontier (a space-based mod with an original storyline, which has itself been modded for various science-fiction things, such as Babylon 5). Additionally, "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization," the Civilization IV form of the great Civilization III mod "Rhye's of Civilization," was also bundled (as I recall), despite being a fandom mod.

Actually the original didn't include any mods, just some scenarios. The expansion pack Beyond the Sword is the one that included several mods, including fan made ones like Rhye's and Fall. The Warlords expansion had some mods too, but they were less praised.

Not only are there mods of Civilization IV, there are modmods of these mods, and on top of that, modmodmods.

Civilization V is continuing the trend, though the ability mod is somewhat limited until the promised .dll source files are released. In the meantime, there's an in-game mod browser, including the Vanilla Enhanced Mod (game balance), the Unofficial Patch (bug fixes), and NiGHTS (reworks the whole game; no relation to the Sega game of the same name).

Master of Orion 3 coded an incredible amount of its game data in easy-to-modify spreadsheets. Given the number of Game Breaking Bugs and incredibly odd mechanics in general, many players found a modded game the only playable version.

Magna Mundi, a popular mod for Europa Universalis III, recently got an upgrade to "full game", developed by the mod team but for commercial release instead.

Red Alert 3 Paradox is a highly ambitious Red Alert 3 mod notable for it`s accompanying wiki project, which is slowly building a detailed 1960s Cold War world out of the highly limited basis of the original game.

The Space Empires series from III onwards. III shipped with a modding tool, while IV and V run on text files.

Galactic Civilizations 2: The Dread Lords, especially after the expansion packs are added, can be modded quite significantly. Mods can include new technologies, whole new tech trees, weapons, planetary buildings, ships, races, and more. There are many total conversion mods that turn it into Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and more. The game's data is stored in organized text files and can be edited using Notepad, however many editing tools, including some official ones, are available.

LEGO Rock Raiders was built primarily using .wad files, and so extraction tools have been made to reveal simple english code, easily changable models and animations, levels that editors were made for, easy images, etc. Now more building, monsters, levels, raiders, new models and animations, even overhaul mods are being made.

Myth II came with a couple of very good editors; it was actively modded for many years, and to some extent still is. In this player's experience, it has more stand-alone mods than any game made before 2000 except Doom, Quake, and Half-Life... and the fact that it's the only non-FPS on that list says something. Moreover, many of those mods (The Seventh God, Jinn, Chimera, Bushido) are large campaigns on par with the originals, and have been included as bonus content in commercial releases such as The Total Codex and Myth II: Worlds.

StarCraft-Broodwar has several mods as well, with the Gundam inspired Gundam Century or Starcraft-Gundam being one of them. Huncraft is an Hungarian-exclusive game mod, that works in the spirit of an actual expansion pack, only with fully translated unit speeches menus and tooltips.

Advanced Strategic Command started as a Fan Remake of Battle Isle series, outgrew it, but retained a BI ruleset (without original copyrighted art, which can be loaded from original BI data) and a few others, and has anything that isn't hardcoded very easy to mod.

The second is shipped with a ready editor for libraries (magic items and heroes) that can be added even in a mostly-standard game and simply added to an archive with a map using them, and rulesets. But after mods ran out of its capabilities and/or into hardcoded stuff, meddling with raw data plus exploiting obscure quirks of the code expanded the boundaries (such as adjusting a specific instance of active ability for strength - so that e.g. an experienced unit develops stronger Healing; or turning an attack ability into another class to change its hardcoded special qualities - so that e.g. Magic Bolts have paralytic effect of Doom Gaze, or Doom Gaze loses it). Then special effect files also were partially analyzed too, allowing to alter ballistics of ranged attacks,[5] adjust sprites to new tile graphics and even create new ones (e.g. animated waterfall with drifting mist or Teleport structure with "swirling sparks" effect). "Unofficial Patch" mods include lots of fun things for map-makers.

Battle for Wesnoth has a lot of mods (mod management including download from the repository is accessible from menu, if not very convenient), from unit sets ("eras") to deep changes that make the game more of 4X or RPG.

FreeCol allows to turn mods (installed in the data directory) on/off with a click of a button, in a hierarchical list (i.e. the order defines which one overrides which). This makes sense, since many mods are alternative graphic sets or very specific features.

Emperor of The Fading Suns was released half-baked, and game data remained less than shiny (including Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors weakened too much) even after patches, so there were several fix and improvement lines, plus custom galaxy maps. There are at least Reality mod (as the name implies, an attempt to make some aspects of the game more true to Fading Suns setting), Nova and Hyperion.

Operation Flashpoint, a 'soldier sim' FPS by Bohemia Interactive was released in 2001, and still has addons and total conversion mods being made for it today. Its two sequels, Arm A: Armed Assault and Arm A II, maintain the modding community of its predecessor.

The sheer volume of content people created for the former bears special mention. The developers kick-started it by including the mission editor, which allows players to create anything from a simple run around and kill a few guys scenario to full-blown combined arms battles far exceeding the complexity of the game's default missions. People soon went from creating their own missions to creating new weapons, soldiers, vehicles, and eventually whole new islands and a new Capture the Island mode, which is a pseudo-RTS game mode in which players battle for an entire island, using resources to build bases and buy equipment). In Arm A II the most "out there" examples would probably be naval combat and in particular submarine warfare of all things, both of which were probably never intended to be implemented by the devs... yet the modding community found a way. There's also been "cops and robbers" and Grand Theft Auto-style Wide Open Sandbox "missions". The DLC for Arm A II: Operation Arrowhead was actually designed to facilitate this: British Armed Forces and Private Military Company consist of their respective campaigns and higher-quality textures/sounds for their respective units and weapons—which were already in OA, so that add-on creators could make use of them even without having the DLC.

The Sims and its sequels allow easy creation and importation of new clothes, faces, and furniture. Website after website can be found with downloadable items that players have designed themselves. Briefly, The Sims 3 was changed to make it mod-unfriendly, but a later update changed that, if not back to the original mod-friendly design.

Free Space 2, thanks to the release of its source code by Volition (under the Freespace 2 Source Code Project), is a frequent subject of Game Mods in the space sim community. The original relase's multiplayer is still functional with dedicated server hosted by the community.

SimCity 4 has quite a bit of mods available at Simtropolis. These mods can go from simple stuff like making the streets' dead-ends more rounded or making the water darker and more realistic, to downright cheating like ordinances that completely erase all pollution and crime from your city, to simple building addons, to entire expansion sets like the Network Addon Mod that adds avenue interchanges, diagonal-straight highway interchanges, roundabouts, walkways, train-street stacks, light rail and more, to completely new games like the SimMars mod that sets the game in Mars.

The mid-90s game Transport Tycoon Deluxe no longer even works on most computers without the help of DOSBox, due to its DOS-based format. However, OpenTTD is an open source emulation that still attracts lots of Game Mods, from replacement graphics to entire new industry chains, alterations to the interface and even whole new modes of transport (tramways recently added to complement the buses/trucks, trains/monorails/maglevs, planes and boats already in the game). One of the mods, to begin with, replaces the locomotives' in-game names with the real ones (e.g. "TIM" and "AsiaStar" are replaced with "TGV" and "Eurostar").

The Zoo Tycoon series has a large amount of fan-made mods made for it, usually to add creatures not included in the game (such as dinosaurs and the denizens of The Future Is Wild series). The first game even had an entire mod creation program created for it—since the animals were sprite-based, it was fairly easy to recolor them if you knew how.

Tons of custom content is around for Creatures and its sequels: objects, creature breeds, and occasionally new worlds/add-on rooms. Official tools to make CC have been available nearly from the start.

The simulation game Petz for PC has a dedicated modding community full of people, called hexers, who use hex-editors to create their own breeds of Dogz and Catz - and even other creatures, from Horsez to Dragonz. More recently, a hex-editor called LNZ Pro was created especially for Petz editing, and a tool called "Petz Workshop" made it possible for users with no hex-editing ability to visually design new Petz breeds in a user-friendly interface.

This is also true of the sister game, Babyz, which runs on the same engine and is editable with the same tools. Although, most mods in Babyz tend to focus around making toyz, clothes, and hairstyles instead of whole new body shapes.

Falling Sand Game 4.4, the original powder game, allows for its physics files(which are just text files) to be modified easily. A community has sprung up around modding the game.

Wing Commander Secret Ops is another favorite of the space sim fan community, for its relative ease of modifications. Its immediate predecessor, Prophecy, has even had multiplayer activated by dedicated fans, the core code for which was Dummied Out due to production time constraints (but not before an ad was published hyping its multiplayer capability).

Orbiter is essentially just a framework on which mods can be installed. There are literally thousands of them available, from ultra-high-resolution planet textures (running into the hundreds of megabytes per planet) to accurate-to-the-second-and-centimeter recreations of every single manned spaceflight ever launched from Vostok to the Space Shuttle and everything in between, flyable versions of pretty much every experimental spacecraft, test plane, and lifting body to ever end up on a drawing board, fictional ships from every sci-fi universe imaginable and plenty of original ones as well, building block kits for constructing your own surface base or space station....the list goes on. The mods considered most essential are Orbiter Sound, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and UCGO/UMMU, which add a cargo system and a life support/crew system to the game respectively.

For the player extremely concerned with realism, there's a fanmade scenario floating around that includes the full constellation of active satellites in Earth orbit in updated-in-real-time accurate position. They would have included inactive satellites and space junk too, but most computers would have been unable to handle it.

With the right mods and enough time on your hands, it's possible for you to play out the entire history of spaceflight in sequence starting with Chuck Yeager's first supersonic flight and continuing through the decades up to the present day and beyond.

The mods have also extended to the creation of fanmade cooperative 'campaigns' in which players work together, each one flying a mission in sequence, to accomplish an objective; the frequent 'Orbiter Forum Space Station' campaigns are an archetypical example.

The open-source space simulator Celestia is also basically a frame to add mods, that range from more detailed textures or newly discovered celestial bodies to real or fictional spacecrafts and space stations, entire solar systems (also fictional or not), and even (pictures of) galaxies. Just search for the Celestia Motherlode as it's known.

Il-2 Sturmovik's avid global modding community makes lots of new maps, skins, missions and campaigns, addon planes and total conversions on a regular basis. Some more complex mods are a bit harder to implement into the game than others, but generally, the modding community has made mods for anything related to prop and jet plane combat flight simulation of the 20th century (particularly things from the WWI era up to the 1950s).

The WWII submarine simulation game Silent Hunter has a huge amount of mods, most of which are oriented to give even more realism to the game (and make it even harder). Plus they may add new ships or planes and -in the case of Silent Hunter III- you can even add sounds and short videos taken from the movie Das Boot.

The Mechwarrior Living Legends total-conversion mod for Crysis Warhead - which adds in battlemechs, jet fighters, power armor, massive maps, and a huge array of vehicles and weapons. After a number of aborted sequels to Mechwarrior 4, it became the fandom's Mechwarrior 5

You can find a Let's Play for The Second Reality Project Reloaded, a remake of two separate ROM Hacks into one game, with the content from the secondary hack tucked away in a super-secret world. The author of the Let's Play in question also features his earlier Let's Plays of the two separate original hacks as a comparison.

There's also the infamous Kaizo Mario World, that Platform Hell codifier hack that basically started off all this 'ROM hacks for Mario have to be really really hard' trend (and the one which caused quite a bit of annoyance towards Youtube LPs by the aforementioned Mario World hack site).

A special case is the Knuckles in Sonic 1 hack, which (as the name implies) makes Knuckles into the playable character in the original Sonic the Hedgehog, in a similar fashion to the Knuckles in Sonic 2 that is obtained by connecting Sonic 2 to Sonic & Knuckles. What makes this interesting is that the original developers had tried and failed to put Knuckles in the first game during the making of S&K, citing technical problems. To make matters even more interesting, they've also created another version putting Tails into the game (with the spin dash, and flight).

In fact, there is a robust community of modders creating ROM hacks of the original series of Sonic games, ranging from the simple, such as recolored levels and simple character replacement (by modifying other characters' sprites), to the intricate, such as creating new level layouts and/or art, adding new characters with unique special abilities, adding new abilities to existing characters, adding new music (either by porting it from other games or creating it from scratch), and even porting or creating new boss characters; some more ambitious projects have arguably converted a given Sonic game into what qualifies as a new entry in the series.

Most notable is the heavily recoded Sonic Megamix, a romhack of the original Sonic, which features saves, 4 new characters besides just Sonic, a new soundtrack, new level art as well as secret 4th acts for each level, new moves and abilities, super forms, new bosses, and a load of other features such as a heavily expanded Sound Test, more options, and Time Attack modes (including a Boss Rush Mode). It's so good that people have likened it to a 5th 2D Sonic game.

The aforementioned Megamix has now become so expansive that it has been ported to Sega CD format, and will apparently (when the game is properly burned to a CD-R, of course) even play on an actual working Sega CD. Madness.

That same hacker has now done several secondary characters in Sonic 1, including Shadow, Amy, Vector and Charmy Bee. Charmy's game is a complete Game Breaker since (just like in Knuckles Chaotix) he can fly forever with no cool down period.

Mega Man Zero 3 has been the target of various well done sprite hacks that replaces Zero with a completely different character such as Vent, or Copy X. First started off as a hack that allowed the ability to play as Omega Zero which was basically a palette swap of Zero and giving the player access to his exclusive attacks.

Rockman No Constancy replaces the environments, attacks, and even the music: rather than Mega Man 2's futuristic looking stages, the ones in Constancy look more mystic or dreamlike (think Sonic CD). Think the game is easier? Think again. The bosses have faster attacks, the stages have brand new gimmicks, the stages themselves are new, and the scenery is just beautiful, as is the music (Yes, it's taken from various sources, but the soundtrack is beautiful anyway). For a peek, look right here.

In addition to Rock Man 4 Minus Infinity, Puresabe also created a bunch of Mega Man side hacks based on the Eastern Zodiac as well. These hacks showcase characters based on the Eastern Zodiac. The 2014 hack features Centaur Man. The 2015 Hack features Sheep Man. The 2016 Hack features Spark Mandrill. The 2017 hack features Storm Eagle. The 2018 hack features Rush.

If you wanted a hair-ripping hack, try your hands at Super Metroid: Impossible. This is made by the person who developed the under-two hour tool-assisted speedrun for Redesign, a mod that typically takes as long as Metroid Prime.

Eversion, having its source code in a text file for all to see, is very easy to modify. Common mods are designed to access its ten or so Minus Worlds or allow for flight or invinciblity.

The PC version of the original Prince of Persia had an even harder level hack called 4D Prince of Persia back in 1994. In more recent years, however, hackers became capable of deeper modifications, and now you can get many new level sets, tiles and character sprites - you may play with levels and graphics from the excellent SNES version. Someone even made a launcher to use all of the stuff combined.

A large portion of the Super Smash Bros. community modifies pretty much everything within Brawl's engine, including custom stages, character skins, movesets, physics, menu appearance, and music. The mods listed below are the major full-on mod projects made from Brawl.

Brawl+ was the first attempt to make Brawl more competitive-oriented. While it reached version 7, the team eventually lost interest and moved on to create Project M, which by contrast is specifically meant to replicate Melee's gameplay.

"Balanced Brawl" tries to mod Brawl by keeping most of the engine intact (i.e. defensive play favored, very little hitstun) while trying to make the game balanced.

Brawl- enhances the game by making everyone God Tier, yet balanced so that it's practically acceptable. It has hitstun comparable to Smash 64, and it's about as fast as Brawl+. It's Brawlon steroids.

Then there's Project M, which basically turns Brawl into the next Melee, having the return of Melee's advanced techniques and physics engine. It's intended to even surpass Melee by making every character good, making almost every stage tourney-legal, and of course utilizing the benefits of being made from Brawl, like better graphics, more characters, and modding capability (see above).

Even without hacking, the arcade version allows players to play custom songs and custom stepcharts for pre-existing songs.

Most Dance Dance Revolution arcade cabinets can also accept custom stepcharts from either USB or Playstation memory cards. A hacked cabinet can also have custom stepcharts built-in, as well as allow modifiers like Fuwafuwa (usually found only in Oni courses) selectable in regular play, and change the color scheme/theme.

Tomb Raider has a level editor, which was released back in 2000, but to this day still has many users developing content for it. It is easy to use due to its Invisible Grid system, but this is somewhat restrictive and gives a very "blocky" appearance. The level editor is for an old PS 1 game engine, but modifications and patching have allowed for almost-PlayStation 2 quality graphics. Notable levelsets include:

Tomb Raider 1: Revised and Unfinished Business Remake, almost perfect recreations of the original game and Gaiden Game keeping as faithful as was possible with the engine at the time (some things had to be modified or removed). They were created because the games were totally unplayable on most modern computers without the use of extra programs (which cost money)

Himalayan Mysteries, an Original Flavor epic that took five years to make, elaborating on the story behind the original continuity's claim that Lara was involved in a plane crash at age 17, rather than age 9 as stated in the Continuity Reboot.

Tomb Raider 4 Gold: Fading Light, notably based on the developer's concept for a Tomb Raider: 4 Gold that was cancelled.

Tomb Raider Anniversary: Retold, a fan-made remake of the original Tomb Raider which comes from fan disappointment with Crystal Dynamics' remake (Tomb Raider: Anniversary). The goal is to produce a more faithful and respectful remake of the original game, with elements of the cancelled remake that was being made by Core Design prior to the Continuity Reboot. After almost two years of development, the first quarter of the game has been released to mixed reviews due to flaws in the control scheme and dull (by TRLE standards) lighting. The project leader was a bit delusional about the quality of his work, and developed an ego problem. That's not a mean thing to say because he's the one typing this. It would appear that TRLE users hate it, while standard-fare TR fans adore it.

Ultimate Mortal Kombat Trilogy, a popular hack of the Sega Genesis/Megadrive version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Contains every version of every character that appeared before and during Mortal Kombat Trilogy and with their own finishers no less, sans the MK 3 version of Noob Saibot which was a black palette swap of Kano. Basically contains much more content than a real cartridge or the Genesis console can handle. And it can actually RUN ON THE GODDAMN THING.

Heboris started off as a simple clone of Tetris the Grand Master 2 - The Absolute PLUS. Official development of it stagnated in 2002, but 2ch posters decided to take it upon themselves to add many mods to it such as more rotation systems and more modes. These additions were collaborated into Heboris Unofficial Expansion.

Unfortunately, development has stopped because the code—a mix of C++ and a Japanese game script—has turned into a complete mess, and attempts to expand on it have proven futile. For this reason (somewhat), a new Tetris clone, NullpoMino, has been produced, and is much more add-on friendly.

In fact, many mods for NullpoMino, such as the Tetris: The Grand Master ACE modes and the infamous Phantom Mania mode, were incorporated by the author into later releases, with credit given to the original modders.

Midway produced unofficial sequels of Pac-Man despite only being the distributor of the games for Namco. One of these was Ms. Pac Man, based on a hack of the original game called Crazy Otto, developed by another company with no official connections then to Pac-Man. Incidently, of the Midway Pac-Man games, only Ms. Pac Man was adopted by Namco.

Darius Gaiden got an official (allegedly) hack called Darius Gaiden Extra, which cranks up the autofire rate, rearranges the stages, and adds an option to play all 28 stages, instead of just 7 of them. Strangely for an arcade game, it also adds a pause function.

Star Trek: Bridge Commander starts out with only a few dozen ships of okay quality. Players have added HUNDREDS of ships with quality that makes most older computers cry (due to high numbers of polygons and large textures). There's even new play modes and campaigns, as well as UI and interactivity improvements.

The Glider PRO scenario "SeaCaves" was more than just a custom level; it included a patch for the game program which changed the graphics for just about everything to fit in with its Under the Sea environment. Only the glider itself still looked the same, except for a temporary transformation into a dolphin.

Grand Prix Legends continues to survive thanks to gradual improvements and hundreds of modded tracks and new car sets.

R Factor was built with the intention that as many add-on cars and tracks could be added to it as the community could provide. It's worked. There's (deep breath); Formula One cars, NASCAR cars, Indycars, the old CART-Indy/Champcars, Australian V8 cars, German DTM cars, rally cars... and most major race tracks in the world (and plenty of fictional ones too).

Aquaria has a built-in level editor and a menu option set aside for accessing mods. The modding community doesn't really extend far beyond the game's official forum, but there have been some fairly decent mods created, including a fan-made prequel to the game proper.

Street Fighter II had various hacked bootleg versions in the arcade such as Rainbow Edition and Koryu that modified many of the games properties, allowing for mid air fireballs, dragon punches that spammed fireball and instant character swapping in game.

Robot Arena 2 has the DSL: Total Conversion mod, which completely revamps the game, ironing out some bugs, adding all new components to make the game more realistic, and even including replica robots of such famous machines as Biohazard, Razer, Nightmare, Chaos 2 and Hypno-Disc. Said modded version is far more popular than the original version.

Kinnikuman: Muscle Fight has Muscle Gear, a tool used to easily create any kind of match the player wants to set up and increase the difficulty of their opponent. It can be used to create AI tournaments; these videos are seen mostly on Nico Nico Douga.

↑Though, some might argue that this isn't strictly a mod, in the way that it doesn't change Source's source code, but it is worth playing nevertheless.

↑however, the hack doesn't feature the pogeys' locations in their Pokédex entries, such as, say, Squirtle's whereabouts being listed as "Unknown area", while 386 included every Pokémon's location instead

↑in AoW 2/SM cover is calculated for the actually used curve, thus "how lofted this trajectory is" has a direct gameplay/balance effect